Snob: 2nd 7"

$8.00

Our take: WOW! WOW! WOW! I wish I had words to convey how much this record excites me. London does it again, delivering exactly the record that I want to hear right now at this precise moment. I feel like I'm definitely going to ramble here because I just dearly love this band and as with the things you really love it's always difficult to describe exactly why... the best you can do is just stab in the dark and hope you eventually hit on something that sounds right. So here goes... first of all, Snob are a hardcore punk band. They're not post-punk, d-beat, or some other precious sub-sub-genre, because you can tell that their music is about more than just style. Like the classic hardcore punk bands that everyone loves, Snob sound like the band that they have to be. A lot of contemporary hardcore punk, by contrast, seems like bands that they want to be, the members casually looking over the history of punk, grabbing a few things here and there, decontextualizing them and appropriating them with relatively little investment or risk. I mean, why reinvent the wheel when you know what works? Something about Snob, however, feels fresh and more importantly contemporary... I feel London and adulthood and sexism and office jobs and visible wealth and a million other things pressing against the edges of this, saying "you can't play that riff, you have to play this one because this is the world we live in and this is the riff that matters right now." I guess that maybe I always feel the weight of a million things pressing down on me, and that's why I really like innovative, slightly artsy bands (like, for instance, a lot of the stuff on Toxic State)... it's like they use their creativity to elide all of those pressures and grab a bit of precious freedom for a few fleeting moments. It's also why I positively hate bands that seem oblivious to this weight, who can just start another sxe band or another d-beat band or another whatever band and people will like them and it all seems so easy. And it's the reason that I love bands like Snob who make me feel not alone in thinking this world is some combination of absurd and completely shitty with the occasional little ray of hope. I haven't really described what this sounds like at all, I realize. I mean, it's fast, it's noisy, and it's punk as shit. And excites the hell out of me and I'm probably going to listen to it several times a day for the foreseeable future. I have no idea how to sell you on it, but if you've been reading these things for a while and you trust my taste you should make a point to get this, because this is without a doubt one of my records of the year.